Martha Nussbaum: Review of Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice

Abstract

After much of the 20th Century, when morals were widely considered little more than mere emotional responses, a range of writers, such as Haidt, Prinz, and Patricia Churchland, have been restoring the emotions’ respectable roles in human cognition and morality. Nussbaum in her Upheavals of Thought showed how important emotions are for human cognitive life, so there is no clear distinction between their “irrationality” and the cerebral cortex’s supposed “rationality.” In Political Emotions, Nussbaum asks readers to look into how pivotally emotions affect political life, especially how we may best gear our emotions for political liberalism. As she convincingly urges, politics depend upon our emotions; we neglect them to our detriment lest demagogues commandeer them. She argues a hazardous case, and by the end anyone who cares about liberal democracy should accede to emotions’ centrality in it. Nussbaum builds her case upon what she deems partially failed models for a civic religion as proposed by Rousseau, Herder, Comte, and Mill. Such proposals acknowledge the duty of the state and its institutions to appeal to citizens’ needs for emotional fulfillment without invoking a deity. Nussbaum finds Rousseau’s and Comte’s proposals too rigidifying for political liberalism. Rousseau calls for homogeneity among the populace in thought and civic response to the arts and national allegiance. Comte, seeing philosophy has fulfilled its purpose, sets up an academy of overseeing philosophers to guide the society’s cultural and emotional life. She finds Mill’s proposal more amenable to democracy’s free-spiritedness, especially his recognizing the need both for allegiance to social institutions and for dissent. In an eccentric move, Nussbaum looks to Mozart’s and da Ponte’s The Marriage of Figaro as a work of political philosophy and Cherubino’s resignation to the bittersweetness of love as a model for the type of love that the state needs. She proposes not quite a secular religion but a bundle of emotional conduits that can foster allegiance while retaining the kind of individual unpredictability intrinsic to a thriving democracy. She evokes Tagore’s “Religion of Man” as even better Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2014) 17:1009–1010 DOI 10.1007/s10677-014-9528-6